Digital media, such as compact discs (CDs) or digital video discs (DVDs), are a popular form of storage media. Recently, writable digital media have become increasingly popular among users for storing personalized data, including creating their own set of musical compilations, pictures, videos etc. Once the user has stored or written digital data onto the medium, the user has applied a label medium by either writing on the medium by hand or affixing a printed label onto the medium using an adhesive.
More recently, systems have been developed for including a labeling layer on a digital medium using a laser of the disc drive. In such systems, laser energy is applied to activate the labeling layer to produce either a grayscale or a color image. In this regard, the optical pickup unit (OPU) that reads data from or writes data to a data layer of the digital medium may also be used for writing labeling data to the labeling layer.
However, such a media drive for writing data and labeling a medium typically requires the user to flip the medium over to label the medium after data has been written, for example. This tends to be inconvenient since the user must monitor the progress of the data write operation, and intervene after its completion by flipping the medium over before the labeling operation can begin. Furthermore, because the data writing and labeling operations are performed sequentially, a longer time is required to produce a written and labeled medium.